Samsung smartphones and tablets vulnerable to kernel attack

ZD Net reports a wide range of Samsung smartphones and tablets with the company's Exynos 4412 and 4210 ARM-based processors are vulnerable to an attack that enables hackers to obtain root access on any of the affected devices.

XDA Developers member alephzain first brought up the vulnerability on the site's forum, claiming that access to the device's physical memory is read-and-write enabled by all users.

With the ability to read and write to memory at will, alephzain said that any application could dump the contents of the device's RAM and/or inject arbitrary code into the kernel. Such manipulations of memory could potentially allow an attacker to extract data and forward it elsewhere, or modify data to present the user with false data while the application does something else. The vulnerability itself also allows devices to be rooted.

The following devices are vulnerable to attack, but the risk seems minimal if you watch out which apps you install on your device.

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anticupidon
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#4481911 Posted on: 12/18/2012 02:18 PM
only Samsung is vulnerable ?

k1net1cs
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#4481932 Posted on: 12/18/2012 02:47 PM

only Samsung is vulnerable ?

Yep.

The vulnerability itself is software patchable, because the point of vulnerability isn't actually the Exynos CPU itself, but rather the custom kernel Samsung used IIRC.
One of the prominent XDA devs, Chainfire, has already made a quick fix for it.
God knows when Samsung would officially patch it, though.

Speed Weed
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#4481955 Posted on: 12/18/2012 03:23 PM
Does it help to run an SGS3 on WiFi only?

Ven0m
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#4481957 Posted on: 12/18/2012 03:30 PM

Does it help to run an SGS3 on WiFi only?

It's not a remote exploit - you need an installed piece of software capable of reading and writing to the hidden memory partition. So most likely you're fine and you'll be fine.

Andrés
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#4482009 Posted on: 12/18/2012 04:43 PM

It's not a remote exploit - you need an installed piece of software capable of reading and writing to the hidden memory partition. So most likely you're fine and you'll be fine.

This. If you install apps only from the Play Store, chances are you'll never have a problem. The viruses come for those who install apps from dubious sources.